Twenty years ago the Republican party stood for huge tax cuts for the rich and wars of choice in the middle east, but then Donald Trump totally remade the party and realigned American poltiics, and now the Republica party stands for…huge tax cuts for the rich and wars of choice in the middle east.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 11:48 AM
This is often a feature, not a bug of out of power coalitions.
The benefit of not having the presidency is you don't need to be unified, the party can kind of be whatever it needs to be in whatever race its running. This is part of how you win lots of seats.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Yep. The dem coalition is basically "everyone who doesn't love Trump and want to hug and kiss are orange boy."
This is a lot of different people with a lot of very different views, which can be pandered to individually to win races because you don't need a national agenda beyond "Trump bad"— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 10:40 AM
(Pretty sure that should read ‘don’t want to hug and kiss our orange boy’)
===
Dems in dis array and dat array
— Chris Labarthe (@chrislabarthe.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 10:43 AM
JaySinWa
What do we want?
Dis-empower Republicans
When do we want it.
Next election?
ETA I’ll let anyone vote against Republicans and take anyone who can win against Republicans for now. We can hash out differences later.
Baud
Stronger Not Together
Baud
@JaySinWa:
You misspelled disembowel.
Steve LaBonne
Signed up to the BJ Patreon before the post disappeared. I will consider that my small victory for today. ;)
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Hey, betcha’ll didn’t know about this:
Which of course reminds me of Monsanto’s classic 60s slogan:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/8740859605
Belafon
Give me 67 senators that know we have to fix things, not destroy them, and let them hash out the details.
Matt McIrvin
I recall how during the Obama years, Obama’s personal popularity wavered from high to mediocre to pretty high again, but Democratic Party support got absolutely hollowed out at the state and local level. Partly because every Republican who hated Obama turned out for the midterm and off-year and special elections.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: One of the things that keep me going is the hope that the Republican Party will face a bleak future once Trump is gone.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I honestly think we politics nerds haven’t fully grokked how much Obama….. is just really fucken cool and the vibes were great.
Baud
@suzanne:
Obama was worse than Bush. He sold us out!
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I thought it more that his “supporters” could only be arsed to go to the polls if Himself was on the ballot.
I hope to heck that happens to Trumpists.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Tankies are convinced of that. Because, drones.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: But the rest of the party drew all of his aggro and relatively little of his coattails. This gets blamed on Obama being personally selfish or uninterested in generalizing his movement sometimes. But maybe part of it is just that his appeal was personal and it’s hard to make other people like somebody else even if they like you.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I’d argue the reason for the disunity is that major parts of our coalition want opposite things. Voters aren’t as complex as we tend to think they are. They mainly vote based on moral issues or because they want a better, easier life. On the left, the morality is based on views about social and economic justice and the environment. On the right, conservative religious views about sex and gender. The better easier life folks are the poor, union members, and other folks who are economicly struggling, which includes some purity progressives. (The biggest purity progressive I know has huge student loans that make it impossible to start a family or buy a home. Folks like that want Europe without the xenophobia which allows generous social programs to have public support). On the right, the better life people want more money via low taxes and fewer environmental restrictions. Most voters are in the better life group. We can’t convince them we can provide that because we mostly can’t. We can make things a little better. We can stop the GOP from hurting certain groups of people. We can’t get enough support for a generous social welfare state. We can’t get enough support to fix climate change, and most of the policies we can come up with do make things more expensive in the short-term (though definitely not the long term). About the only thing we can promise is we’ll mostly be less corrupt.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s an old meme/rotating tag.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes.
I also think that the nerdier one gets, the worse a judge of likability one becomes. But affect, looks, demeanor, tone, all this ineffable stuff matters.
Geminid
I’d say Virginia Democrats are united. It helps to have ongoing statewide elections with a strong politician at the top of the ticket.
It’s a fairly young ticket too; I’m not sure about our Lieutenant Governor candidate, but I think Abigail Spanberger is 46 years-old and Jay Jones, our AG candidate, is 36.
Booger
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Yes, and the CSB produces the best youtube videos this side of Chubby Emu!
Archon
@Baud: Yeah he once droned an American who renounced their citizenship and joined a terrorist organization so I guess that makes him a war criminal on par with Bush.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: This is also a *huge* difference between the very online left and political normies. Both groups ended up disenchanted with Biden in 2024. But the online ultra-left hate Obama and the normies still like him and are nostalgic about him.
Baud
@Archon:
I think Trump 1.0 showed that concerns over drone warfare was largely fictitious.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Constitutional hardball obstruction has given the Republicans a giant advantage, since they’re the “government can’t do anything” party and all they have to do is make sure that’s true.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s not all they have to do. They also have to shift blame to others. Which they have successfully done.
WaterGirl
@Booger:CSB?
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I did not *approve* of Obama’s escalation, but Greenwald’s behavior when Trump escalated it further demonstrated that Greenwald had just cherry-picked it as the one area of war where he could say Obama was warring harder than Bush (because it was just getting started under Bush).
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: The online ultra-left are a rounding error and they do not matter at all.
WaterGirl
@suzanne:
Once more for the cheap seats!
Trollhattan
Mood.
You need Ladybird as Psycho Killer. You know you do.
Trollhattan
It begins.
Yay us, we only have PG&E for gas. Wind tends not to knock down gas lines but if it’s possible, they’ll be PG&E’s.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@schrodingers_cat: Extra judicial exactions are only human when it’s done by an NKVD officer with the IQ of a door knob!
Archon
@Matt McIrvin: I disagree, the online left stayed with Biden to the end and were furious that he was replaced even though polls showed him within the margin of error with Trump in Illinois and New Jersey
WaterGirl
@Trollhattan: So what happens to the people who need power for medical equipment or something like that????
brendancalling
This post is poignant and sad, as political wire post that the Democrats are indeed in disarray, Ken Martin has been a failure, and the party may need to borrow money to remain competitive.
Matt McIrvin
@Archon: That’s not what I was reading on left social media. At all. There was general fury with Biden over Gaza and to some extent over police brutality, some of which transferred to Harris.
The Democrats I knew IRL all thought Biden was senile and had to go, and thought I was crazy for not necessarily agreeing.
The people *here* were loyal to Biden.
WaterGirl
@brendancalling:
Can you say more, or was there supposed to be a link? I’m not sure what you’re referring to here.
Matt McIrvin
…oh yeah, I forgot: Those people on Mastodon and Bluesky were furious at Biden and Harris for being too pro-Israel, but there was the other set of Democrats on Facebook who called them antisemites for not being pro-Israel *enough*. No way to win there.
Trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Right? If you live in one of these areas–mostly but not entirely rural–you have to have backup power, be it battery or generator or Giant Gerbil Wheel.
PG&E will be happy to supply NG for your generator, at which point you’re almost your own utility. But wait, they don’t serve rural areas with NG, so you’re down to propane. Lots of propane.
Betty
He might be referring to the resignations from the DNC of the American Federation of Teachers and AFSCME. They were apparently unhappy with Martin’s leadership.
Geminid
@Betty: Also, the New York Times put up an article today titled, “Inside the chaos swirling through the DNC.” I haven’t read it, just seen it referenced.
cmorenc
@Matt McIrvin: …yes in 2010 GOP turnout was high, but Democratic-leaning voters were *meh*, whatever and the result allowed the GOP to use its capture of governorships and state houses to implement the radical gerrymandering that gives them lasting advantage in the balance in the house of representatives
.
Jackie
@Betty: I’m not happy with him, either. I wasn’t pleased that Martin was chosen, but hoped to be proven wrong.
From the article I think brendancalling was referring to:
Baud
@Jackie:
I’m somewhat amused that the complaints are that he’s not cozying up to big donors and is spending money on a 50 state strategy.
Not defending him because I don’t know, but that piece is funny.
Omnes Omnibus
@brendancalling: Ken Martin has been DNC chair for how long? Give me a fucking break.
WaterGirl
@Betty: Holy fuck, those are two huge groups. Are they leaving Democrats or are they making an attention getting move so the DNC gets its shit together.
Jackie
@Baud: The article is worth reading.
Jackie
@Betty: That was mentioned in the NYT article. When I read Randi Fine, President of the American Federation of Teachers stepped down, I was stunned.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Matt McIrvin:
Fixed. “The” people who weren’t would like to think we didn’t take names.
planetjanet
@Jackie:
Consider the source of the writing. Perenial article on why Dems are worse.
rekoob
@Geminid: Ghazala Hashmi is 60, turning 61 on 5 July. She has a Ph.D. in English from Emory and was an educator before getting into politics.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Trollhattan:
So CA should definitely allow more AI data centers to be built plus make sure crypto gets more entrenched in the system as helped along by both of CA’s Senators over the last 24 hours who voted for the latest crypto bill!
You peons and your electricity needs. Big tech’s needs are more important. Money laundering is more important! /s
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Offhand, I can only think of two commenters here who pushed for Biden to step aside, although I’m sure there were others.
Anyway, Kay and Quinerly aren’t here anymore, they’re over on Mistermix’s blog.
Jackie
@planetjanet: True. But high profile Union members stepping down because of Ken Martin is fact, not opinion.
Ruckus
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Even it most people don’t think much about politics they still have concepts of how to make it better. Rethuglicans effectively want to get rid of or make slaves out of anyone that does not see their way as the only way forward. You know, conserve whatever the hell they want at the lowest price and get rid of all the humans that don’t make their life better and them richer. And IF we look at history that is a concept that pure wealth is the answer. But many humans do not really look at life from the side of what does each of us do to make it better for all, they look at it from the what’s in it for me side. At a time within the lifetime of many still alive today, the world was a hell of a lot different. US politics wasn’t all that different but the effect that each side had was different. A big part of this differing view is what do we do to live. Do we work 60-80 hours a week just to make ends meet? Do we have a few thousand in the bank, and make enough with one of the adults in the home and the other working a relatively normal job, and the pay is enough to live reasonably and there are a few uber wealthy? Or is it the current world where we have more than a few very, very wealthy, and we purchase a lot of our stuff from overseas manufacturing rather than here? Which means that we likely have a smaller percentage of mid level manufacturing jobs and a lot more workers in some sort of service job, while all the while the cost of EVERYTHING has gone up a LOT. So we effectively now have an economy where the Forbes 500 is now the Forbes 5000, and most of the rest of us really do not have the option of a skilled job, but one more of at best, just getting by? I worked mostly in manufacturing tools that made everyday things. A lot of that, and other businesses have moved offshore which changes a lot for a lot of people. And our economy. Also the population has grown, well everywhere. Our economy used to provide some things for export, how much more is now imported rather than made here? A lot. I made a lot of tooling that made products for normal usage, but much of that is technical work, which used to be more manual labor and is almost all computerized now. From a business owner’s point of view this is better but from a JOBS and average income point of view it may not be at all. How many other lines of business are similarly affected? A lot I’d bet.
And to my mind the big problem is that from the wrong standpoint it looks like we are making MORE money but the benefit does not always pay out equally.